To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consume 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Dr. Morrow, formerly a fellow at the Belfer Center, is a professor of mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University

Researchers said that vehicle miles traveled will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.

This insane result of Obama’s policies comes in the wake of the fact that global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is a documented fraud based on the worst pseudo-science and demagoguery. Far from being scientific, the global warming agenda is now being blasted as a blatant danger to the field of science itself by the Institute of Physics. Just look at their first two points as they confront “ClimateGate” and the collapse of even a facade of scientific legitimacy:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

The Institute of Physics continues to damn “climate change research” up one side and down the other for a total of 13 points. Climate change is a sick, twisted joke that has fundamentally eroded trust and credibility of the entire scientific enterprise. Not that Obama cares. He is a true believer who will destroy our economy by massively redistributing American wealth to the rest of the world in order to “fix” the planet.

Obama’s irrational energy policies also comes in the wake of the fact that the United States has massively more domestic oil than Democrats previously claimed. Which is to say that any energy policy that does not include the concept of “drill baby, drill,” simply isn’t rational. We have abundant oil, natural gas, and coal resources. In this time of economic difficulty, let us finally use them!!!

Democrats have always dreamed that America would become more like Europe. And soon it will: we’ll be taking buses because we can’t afford to pay the same skyhigh prices for gasoline that Europeans have to pay because THEY elected socialists.